How to "thicken" a thin vocal?

[joel hamilton]

hello everyone
I like to mult the main vocal into three parts
L-C-R

pitch the left up a few cents with an indicernable amount of delay on it
pitch the right down a few cents """"""""

blend your stereo tracks in underneath the main vox


basically what Joel said minus the whole "professional" angle

spx 90 has a patch called "Pitch change c" which does this

i like to use an AMS 15-80 to do the same thing.

The SPX90 is one of the things i use on vocal ALL the time. The H3000 has a "wider is better" setting that is a dynamic version of the pitch change C thing. That works well too.

Or, two delays off a mult of the main vocal, PRE compressor with SLIGHT LFO on each of the delays at different speeds. That can be amazing. I use two effectrons for that quite a bit.

I like to widen the vocal with someting like mentioned above, then run a mono spring verb up the center, along with a tape echo up the center, but with a LITTLE bit of the spring and the sidener on the tape echo return. Couple that with whatever verb you are using and you have a wonderfully complex, dense, but diffuse "glow" around the main vocal that doesnt even sound like FX until you hit stop...

[logancircle]

Try re-amping it through a guitar amp with different kinds of distortion (or whatever works) and close-mic the amp, some violent compression.

[SvefnGEnglar42]

The singer in my own band has a thin and odd voice. A trick that seemed to work recently (after 8 years of recording the guy) was to lower the mic to mid chest level. I think I angled it up towards his mouth a bit. So I literally recorded more body so I could hear more body.

I've tried something very similar to this. In my case, it seemed to work best with the mic more a throat level and angled upward (toward mouth). Managed to get more "boom" out of the recording, but it started to cause other issues with the mix afterwards.
On that note, maybe I could get some some advice on how to get vocals that are a bit too thick to level out without sacrificing the "personality" of the recording?

[snuffinthepunk]

Sometimes I usa a stereo delay with really short times spread left to right which can help...like 25ms to the left, and 50ms to the right. It won't solve eq issues, but will give a "larger" sound to the voice.

i think this would be a cool thing to do on the "whisper" track, myself...it would thicken it as well as provide probably a really cool effect if you set the delay times long enough (25-50ms on pre-delay and then spread the rest out...hmmmmmm)

[the riff]

Great thread fellers....

I have actually split the track into two channels. Panned hard left and right and inched one a few seconds behind (or ahead of) the other. I prefer this over using a doubling plugin or delay. Works nice in some cases.

[GrimmBrotherScott]

It's funny, I called the guy the afternoon we were to record and said I had posted this on the board, gotten some great suggestions, and was dying to try them out...so naturally we finished up some guitars that night. Bastard!

It was the right thing to do as they (the band) need to keep the feeling of moving forward and often get bogged down doing vocals. I fully intend to use him as my guinea pig to try a variety of these techniques and post the results for the board to hear. I will get to it as soon as possible.

He's a TapeOp fan, so he will be more than happy to indulge.

[Lee Knight]

I like to record another pass an octave down. Make it loud and it sounds like Squeeze. Blend it in and the singer has big balls.

[joel hamilton]

Great thread fellers....

I have actually split the track into two channels. Panned hard left and right and inched one a few seconds behind (or ahead of) the other. I prefer this over using a doubling plugin or delay. Works nice in some cases.

I will do this in certain cases, but I will also use something to slightly modulate the pitch of the delayed copy. slight pitch variations make it feel even wider. I use something ITB or maybe something that will slightly LFO like an effectron II or something.